1.
Jameson suggests the theme of periodization is a postmodern concept which involves the breaking down of history into separate periods or eras, and these are defined through certain ideas and concepts. How might we periodize The Lonely Londoners?
2.
Jameson describes postmodernism:
"[I]s often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism. This new moment of capitalism can be dated from the post-war boom in the United States in the late 1940s and early '50s [...]. The 1960s are in many ways the key transitional period, a period in which the new international order [...] is at one and the same time set in place and is swept and shaken by its own internal contradictions and by external resistance." (544)
Is The Lonely Londoners a postmodern text in the way Jameson describes?
3.
How does the novel explore the social fragmentation of modern city living?
4.
How does the form of the novel (episodic structure) challenge or mediate the isolating and fragmented experience of living in a modern cityscape?
5.
Jameson argues reality is experienced through consumer capitalism culture, "the rapid rhythm of fashion and styling changes; the penetration of advertising, television and the media generally to a hitherto unparalleled degree throughout society" (553). Does Selvon portray the characters' experience of London through a series of capitalist images?
6.
Jameson is interested in how the boundaries between personal and public have become blurred and whether or not individualism under capitalism is merely a myth. He wonders if art and the representation of our inner and outer worlds through art might reveal the
Schizophrenic breakdown or merger of the private and public. What does The Lonely
Londoners have to say about individualism under 1950s capitalism in the UK?
7.
How does Selvon re-inscribe or rearticulate the city of London within a West Indian sensibility?
8.
Jameson describes pastiche as ‘the random cannibalisation of all the styles of the past, the play of stylistic allusion.’ This is partly the result of over-exposure. In the age of mass media there is a sense that we have seen too many films, watched too much TV, too much advertising. We are over-familiar with the forms of mass culture, which means it’s impossible to be original. We can only recycle the conventions of earlier texts – which
Jameson calls the cannibalisation of the past.
Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is fresh and experimental in style, structure and content. However, we can trace the echoes of James
Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique, does this mean the novel is pastiche?